Project description
Cost- and time-efficient device to provide relief for nasal disease patients
Nearly 260 million Europeans suffer from nasal airway obstruction, which limits airflow through the nose. Surgery could be risky and costly for patients and governments. Spanish company NASAL has developed a medical device based on computational fluid dynamics analysis of nasal cavities. By investigating patients’ airflow patterns, it supplies a lot more medical data than conventional techniques. Its virtual surgery tool will save health systems time and money. To further upgrade and prepare the solution for the market, the EU-funded NASALFLOW project will perform a feasibility study to assess its technical, commercial and financial viability.
Objective
Nasal airway obstruction (NAO) can be defined as nasal ventilatory difficulty of a patient that is unable to achieve enough air volume in the upper airways to keep a quiet breathing without perception of obstruction or resistance. From 30% to 40% of population suffer from NAO, 259 million people in Europe alone.
Some of the patients suffering nasal diseases need to undergo surgery, a procedure that is potentially hazardous for the patient, but also very expensive for patients and governments.
The value of the worldwide medical technology market will reach €458.7bn by 2022, growing at a rate of 5.1% per year between 2016 and 2022.
Nowadays, the most used tests by the clinicians are Peak nasal inspiratory flow, Acoustic Rhinometry and Rhinomanometry. These tools are rarely used in clinical practise due to its limitations. Hence, there is an upcoming need for new objective and accurate technologies that provide more detailed information about the airflow patterns inside nasal cavity.
The revolutionary NASAL~ FLOW® is an automatized medical device based on the Computer Fluids Dynamics (CFD) analysis of human nasal cavities. A standardised procedure is set to study systematically the flow patterns of each patient and provides a huge amount of medical information that traditional methods are not able to obtain. In addition, it embedded a Virtual Surgery tool (VS), where several surgery methodologies can be assessed computationally without invasive procedures for the patient, saving time and money for health system. This approach will help in diagnosis and surgical planning for nasal diseases.
N.A.S.A.L. is a Spanish SME founded in 2008, dealing with the improvement and updating of the medical procedures used in the Ear, Nose and Throat field and the patients’ well-being, through the development of applications that facilitate daily work and the decision-making of the doctors. NASAL~ FLOW® will boost the company revenues streams over a new market niche.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
28020 MADRID
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.